Wife of Turkey Foreign Minister says women’s rights improving
The Turkish Foreign Ministry sponsored an event on Monday to demonstrate concern about violence against women.
Turkish officials under the patronage of the wife of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday, Nov. 18, presented a flurry of statistics showing reduced poverty and more official attention to crimes against women since the ruling AKP government took office more than a decade ago.
But the hour-long session and buffet lunch, to which the Turkish Embassy in Washington invited several dozen prominent American women and diplomats, was notable for one statistic that was lacking: the number of violent assaults on Turkish women each year.
“I don’t have the exact numbers right now,” said an official from the Ministry of Family and Social Policies, which was established in 2010. This seemed surprising, given that the first sentence of the title of the event was “Prevention of Violence Against Women.”
The 2012 US State Department report on human rights in Turkey states, “Government statistics on violence against women were incomplete, and societal acceptance of domestic abuse in some cases contributed to its underreporting.”
